Somebody made you a moderator already? I don't see why we can't mix condolences and expressions of sorrow with respectful discussion of the safety issues.
I've had my share of bereavements, including my brother's suicide, but I never felt that people should have two separate conversations with me, one to share my grief and one to discuss what happened.

I have started this thread to give an opportunity for those of us that have been affected by the tragic loss of a friend, colleague, or maybe just an acquaintance: Alex Bennett.
As reported elsewhere Alex very sadly lost her life along with that of her little dog in a boat fire on Thursday. Her death has sent a shockwave through the boating community, especially affecting those with links to the historic boating community where she was very well known as the owner of Tench.
There are many questions in our heads about what may have happened to take her from us but this is not the place to look for answers to those questions - this is a place for us to share our memories of happy times with involving her and perhaps a few anecdotes that we can smile about as we remember the vibrant character she was.
There are a lot of boaters out there really feeling her loss and so perhaps some of us can share some photos of happy times and the associated memories so we can grieve for her loss together? She was always such a lively and energetic person I am sure there will be plenty of people willing to join me in raising a virtual glass to toast the life of a lady who touched a lot of lives
I will start he ball rolling by sharing a photo of her steering Tench when it was beautifully turned out R.I.P. Alex :
Edited to add photo credit to Carolyn Theobold

I was aware of our local food bank asking for toiletries and also remembered an article which highlighted that women needing to access food banks frequently have issues affording “feminine hygiene” products.
My daughter has a part time job in Boots and so we get discount here. If the product is a Boots own brand product we get 22.5% discount, so I got a couple of baskets and raided the feminine hygiene aisle targeting own brand products, for forty quid I got two black bin bags full, the food bank was delighted.
Just to highlight that the homeless and cash strapped members of our community need other things as well as food for a little dignity in their lives.

The bully in the thread is a man called Trump.
The Americans elected (with a minority of those who voted) a man who lies, constantly.
A man who brags about grabbing pussy, paid off a porn actress, makes sexual references to his own daughter, regards the Klan as good people, is funded by the NRA, for whom he fronts.
A man whose campaign he has finally been forced to admit was supported by russian state troll-bots, with the aim of electing him as it would do the most damage to their enemy. Once exposed, who claims the interference was 'inconsequential'.
Man whose utterances have the coherence of someone with a degenerative mental condition, or a drunk on the sidewalk. Who uses every appearance as a simple huckstering for his own agenda - recall his speech to the scouts?
A man who has filled the administration with unqualified, incompetent family and business partners, who enriches his business empire openly through his office. Who converted his Florida resort into a cash machine by relocating the White House there for 4 days a week.
Who pushed through tax benefits that benefit his own wealth and the richest most, refuses to open his tax returns, and whose property business interests including those in Eastern Europe have the hallmark investment structures of money laundering for mafia. A man with a trail of bankruptcies and unpaid creditors going back decades. Trump university?
A man who has taken USA out of climate change control treaty, who has said climate change is a chinese hoax. Who referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. Who suggested Nigel Farage should be UK ambassador!
A man who says 'lock her up' while trying to have the FBI investigation into Americans involved in Russian interference stopped.
A man who cries 'fake news' when confronted with objective facts that don't fit his warped ideas. Who uses 'alternative facts' - or as most people would say - lies.
A man who now says he can find the funding to arm teachers instead of limiting access to assault weapons.
This man is the most powerful military 'leader' in the world - his derangement and shameless narcissism threatens all of us, because as he put it - he has the biggest button of all. He wants a military parade to show it off.
The disrespect shown to America and those who voted for/support this charlatan, on this thread and elsewhere, is not just appropriate it is essential. Respect is earned and likewise disrespect.

Two possibilities.
One is to keep the dinosaurs who think metrication is unnecessary and stupid happy that they are still getting 2lb.
Two they are using a machine calibrated in lbs but putting metric measurements on.
Life would be so much easier if we had properly gone metric back in the 70s and forced all the dinosaurs to get into the present day.

Aye, it didn't matter if a few plebs got killed in the process in them days. There were plenty more to fill the gaps, wot with no mollycoddling social security benefits for the idle blighters to fall back on. Sadly, by 1945, those in charge had managed to kill most of them off by other means which meant the few left had to have a bit more care taken of them...

People have lived on boats for yonks. When I moved aboard 28 years ago I was told of the few very easy to understand very easy to comply with rules concerning boat movements. The same rules still apply and are still easy to comply with, you move around LOTS or you pay for a mooring. You can live on your boat quite easily. The beauty of boats is that they move.

Having watched drifting snow all morning as it shifts about and builds up in places I thought a reminder to make sure all cabin ventilation,both low/level and high level are clear of snow build-up, was in order.
Stay warm and stay safe.

Im sorry but i must protest
wind turbines are there to upset cyclists , why otherwise would you use a scarce resource like electricity produced by coal to produce a wind.
solar panels suck up lightons from the sun lightons create heat therefore solar panels are the cause of global cooling. By stopping the suns rays from warming the earth and by default the core the problem worsens.
eco fans are a way of using heat to make noise and spread the smell of reindeer droppings around the boat ( see earlier post)
a green electrical tariff is a way of making people in lunon feel less guilty about their 350 cm tv.
coal burned on the ranges of historical boats is fairy dust .
in australia the water goes the wrong way down the plughole
a shagged out springer in hackney is worth 3 times the value of a shagged out springer in coventry plus 60 quids worth of diesel.
weathermen are always right eventually how ever their timing may be off, sometimes by years.
spending three times as more on a boat battery will mean that you can abuse it less.
1960s steel was better than 2006 steel
everything now is far worse than it used to be, what used to be a concern is now an unprecidented catastrophe never before experienced.
house prices always go up, even if by mistake you rented it to a bloke in a backwards facing baseball cap 'for cash no questions asked' who used it to produce ' product'
if you follow all the health advice in the readers digest the improvements will improve your lifespan by 137 years.
political correctness and outrage will forge change that will benefit thingkind
these are facts and set in stone run your lives according to their rules and You will ultimately enter the zone of bovine contentment and attain the highest point of maslows hiarchy of needs- self actualisation
Dont arrange to have me sent to no asylum i kept the key when I 'left'

as you probably know I cannot speak for the company im not permitted but digress on this 20 years ago when I first started with the company we sold resistors voltage regulators ,ic chips, wire wounds dpdt.spst, etc etc as if they were going out of fashion. that customer has now gone, only the polish and Romanians etc mend and make do now the rest lob it up their local tidy tip. ,don't believe what you are reading in the news and watching on the news as gospel , we have changed tack and it is working trust me but we need tweaking and that's what is going on. so yes online is cheaper and some staff need more knowledge but give us the old uns a chance to pass on our knowledge to them ,before you slag them off.
this forum passes info to the newbies like me that's why im here learning, so support your local store and if you encounter a young one spend five minutes explain to them what you need why you need it and how it works.
see you all on the cut in 2019 with a boat that will light up like a scene from close encounters all executed from my phone

BSP's recipe for Supertherm
All you need is an extra large baking potato, a cast iron potato baking device that sits on top of your stove, a small square of kitchen foil and a lobotomy.
1 take your baking potato, prick it with a fork and wrap it in foil
2 put it in the potato baker
3 forget about it for 3 days and nights
Et voila! One solid briquette of Supertherm; a third the size of the original potato.
This recipe was brought to you by someone who despite repeatedly smelling baked potatoes and thinking 'Ooh, I'll have that potato with my next meal", still managed to repeatedly forget I'd remembered not to forget it.

We should be uneasy about the way this has developed. Porton Down exact words, which have been repeated specifically by May and others are 'Nerve agent of a type developed by Russia'. It is a very calculated phrasing, not being 'Russian made'. My laptop is of a type developed in USA - made in china.
Novichok developers left russia and now work in the west. I do not know if novichok production capability, or indeed stock, is at Porton Down, but if it is a global leader it certainly ought to be. Right by Salisbury...
The haste with which an ambivalent analysis has been converted into a political certainty whiffs of 'WMD capability'. It has been used to corner and denounce Corbyn, by compliant and unquestioning media and stooges, at a time when the govt (heavily funded by russian interests) is on the ropes over the brexit fiasco. This looks possibly like diversion, and ought to be questioned. Our govt has form in this area, and that ought to trigger concern, not 'patriotic' drum-bashing.
Putin is a dangerous, ruthless dictator perfectly capable of something like this - but that doesn't mean he did this thing. Starting a war with Putin may well be a good idea, but not on a shaky premise bandwagon. Last times we did that (WMD spring to mind) it didn't go well.
Russian (illegal) money currently accounts for a huge proportion of UK PLC's economy via fraudulent LLP's and opaque money laundering activity - that is a valid target, but not one our govt is likely to pursue...empty gestures are being made instead, while a political football has been played.

Earthworks constructed in the Georgian and Victorian periods pre-date the establishment of the discipline of geotechnical engineering and are effectively non-engineered structures. They were built with non-homogenous materials with little understanding of the properties of the material or the mechanisms by which they could fail.
Standard practice was to construct slopes with sides battered at 1:1.5; an engineered solution would have given something in the order of 1:3 for the materials concerned. This can be seen in the difference in angle of modern motorway earthwork slopes compared to older canals and railways. In theory these assets have a negative safety factor; in practice you know they don't because they remain standing.
The reality is that you are intrinsically operating around the limits of capability and to make matters worse the properties of soils change over time and not just seasonal either, it can be over decades or centuries. As a result they are flexible assets and they all exhibit some form of movement over a greater or lesser timespan. Inspection isn't easy and a general visual inspection may identify immediate exceptional issues but it isn't sufficient for overall management. That requires a qualified inspector.
It is certainly possible to calculate the risk associated with individual assets and prioritise work accordingly. In my job a few years ago I was accountable for 14,000 earthwork assets and conducted an exercise to risk rank them, a process which identified 72 highest risk assets. Programmes of work were put in place for those assets and mitigation measures imposed for periods of extreme wet weather (with a budget the folks at CRT could probably only dream about). However the collective risk associated with the 13,928 assets that weren't highest risk by far outweighed the collective risk of the 72 highest risk assets. That meant I could in no way guarantee that if there was a failure it would be of a highest risk asset. The nature of these events is that they are highly subjective to localised conditions.
CRT have the problem that their threshold for catastrophic failure is pretty low. Initial failure is likely to be a rotational slip where a segment of soil rotates and causes a shearing effect at the slope surface at the top of the rotation. If that causes a loss in the integrity of the puddled lining of the canal the leakage of water will liquefy the soil and cause it to flow, in turn this will make a bigger breach and then washout will follow. It looks a lot more spectacular than I suspect it is in reality.
i am sure they could do more and will seek to do so as that's pretty much the life of an asset manager who has to work within resource and funding constraints to minimise risk.
JP

They are campaigning on behalf of members who mostly don't want to 'travel', who wish to stay in one place without paying for a home mooring. They are not representing boaters they are representing people who want cheap and convenient accommodation on the waterways without following the rules and without cost.
If that's not a threat to enforcement, bona fide continuous cruisers and leisure boaters I don't know what is.

Non londoners dont understand to move you have to book a mooring swop with another boat. Unco ordinated movements would result in outsiders being able to maybe do a short visit to the capital (you know hirers people like that) so you break down a lot have lots of hospital visits etc. one boat towing another would require 4 boats to move ar same time- unheard of in 2018

The Russians need time to obtain a sample, identify it (there are hundreds of varieties), confirm if it is one they have made, check their records which are probably a mess given their history, check their stocks to see that none is missing, and none has been substituted, and check if any has been sold either officially or by individuals out to profit from periods of instability in Russia's history.
I notice there are allegations that nerve gas has been present in the Ukraine conflict in 2015.
Or we can just decide they are guilty because we don't like them.

The best bit of kit I have on the boat is a " Woman " some are expensive to maintain but if you get the right model then they are invaluable. This one does all the washing and cleaning whilst i type on here and drink beer. She knows how to clean stuff without my advice so choose the correct model. Oh and make sure shes one that doesnt ever read the forum

You can save a tremendous amount of money by shopping cheap, like at Aldi. Foraging around for food, like berries, damsons, plums, stinging nettles for soup, cumfry, figs, hazel nuts, scrumping for apples ect, all of which is good roughage and will keep you regular and healthy. Avoid horrid unhealthy greasy expensive fry ups and steaks which can bung you up, go easy on the chips. Boiling the bark of willow trees to ward off reumatism-aspirin, soot from your chimney to brush your teeth with fluoride. Homemade candles made by casting old chip fat and string in toilet roll tubes for lighting. All good Ray Mears stuff. The only trouble with him is he must carry an awful amount of gear around, for whatever he gets up to he always produces some different implement for the task in hand, like ''just break it up with your 16lb sledge hammer from out of your knapsack''. A bit like that old Jack Hargreaves fellow on the telly,''After you've turned it up on your 10'' centre lathe, tranfer to your Sentinel milling machine to tidy it up and then just weld the bits together with your Oxy-acteylene plant. While thats cooling down you might as well mow the lawn with your John Deere sit on gang mower taking care to avoid rocks around your rock crushing plant which you have bought to make a rockery.

It is very much to do with us. His America First policy is clear. Europe - which we are part of even if many think we are something else, is dependant on NATO for strategic defence against a genuine resurgent Russian threat. Trumps words and action on NATO have massively weakened and destabilised Europe's defence position. That is driving hawkish right wing elements - and Russian ones too. It is dangerous, directly so, for us in the UK.
His reneging on the Paris accords sets off a new spiral of American pollution and warming contribution, for which all our children will pay the price. America already leads the world in this but has just taken the brakes off.
His normalising of populist fascism - to give the correct name to his 'policies' - has undermined the US and western hegemony, and legitimises similar fascist tendencies elsewhere, at the same time as handing global leadership to the Chinese, for whom he is the ultimate proof of failure of western democracy and its delegitimisation. Again, this affects us directly in the power play about to unfold with Brexit.

I am pleased to say some action has been taken (I assume by CRT as I did not see it happen).
The boat has been moved 100 yards further away from the lock, moored and the engine compartment has been mostly emptied.
Thanks for all the concern and comments.

Anyone else had an email asking for a 'Snap survey' of opinions of CRT?? Got mine this morning and spent some time over it - got to be helpful. My final comment to the last question was:
'Strongly believe that if canal managers actually and regularly travel their own sections of waterway rather than sitting behind a desk trying to make sense of this sort of survey - many of the questions you have asked would become irrelevant.'

In many ways I am not that sad at his passing. He has lived a life beyond many people's expectations in all sorts of ways even medical science. He has inspired a generation of scientists and will continue to do so. There is a huge scientific body of work some of which will possibly be proved to be incorrect with some as yet unknown evidence, some proved beyond doubt by the people who will build on what he has achieved. Only time and history will tell but he could remain in people's perception just like some of the other greats of previous scientific ages such as Einstein or Newton or any of the other household names.
A hugely significant person of our time not just for his scientific work but his humanity and guts to keep buggering on no matter what life threw at him.

A crime has been comitted. The normal processes of obtaining justice should apply. A full investigation, charges made, an opportunity for charged parties to defend themselves, and they are innocent until proved guilty. In this country this normally takes months. But Russia has been given 24 hours to prove itself innocent? Without full disclosure? This is a visceral reaction which just exposes deep-seated prejudices.

Ahh so sad , that must have been the longest engagement to Ann , 40 years . referring to his legendary over running shows it was stated his funeral is Friday - Saturday - Sunday and most of Monday . His passing leaves a space that will not be filled .

Mr off grid also fails to grasp that in this country we don't have a national organisation that lobbies to protect the 'rights' of those that perpetrate acid attacks in th UK.
Yes we acknowledge in this country there is an acid attack problem developing, and one that requires addressing, he and those of his ilk just try every diversionary tactic in the book in order to try and avoid addressing the massive problem of us gun crime on the basis that other countries have different problems.
As an argument for not doing anything it's frankly weak and pathetic in the extreme.

Well it seem that every forum has one or two, I posted my first question simply to ask advise, within minutes I get an answer telling me I'm not the man to plan a build, and not to try re-inventing the wheel. If I did not need help or advise then obviously I would not be on this site and I would not be asking. I thank each and every one that has answered my question and left me with positive feed back ( and before I get another smart remark I can take negative response as well as positive) but I do feel that as a newbie to this forum comments as above are not the best way to get others interested in canal boating.

I wasn't after sympathy. Some people have no idea what they are talking about and I was merely trying to explain that most solicitors spend a long time studying and a long time not earning. If these things really are that simple then why don't people get off their arse and do the work themselves rather than bleating about the cost of having a professional do it?

CRT are in a no-win situation here...
Their current method seems to be "Do nothing until a boat sinks and causes pollution" then they take action
this method leaves them open to criticism for not taking action to prevent it happening.
If they take action and pump out the boat (without charging) then this can be seen as established procedure in the future.... if in the future another boat sinks due to similar circumstances will that boat owner take legal action against CRT for not pumping out their boat.
If they take action and pump out the boat (charging the owner if known) then it leaves them open to argument about whether or not the boat would have sunk before the owner took action, at worst it will come down to the opinion of a CRT employee (picture coming back to your boat to find a note of "We pumped out 1 inch of water from your bilge because we thought your boat was in danger of sinking, please pay £100 within 28 days")

Sorry boys and girls but I find it hard to believe that anyone with even half a brain between their ears can defend the current US gun laws.
(Happy to be a soft, pompous, know-all, oh so righteous and arrogant Brit)

Any conflict, whether terrorism or state war, is eventually ended by the two sides talking to each other. It may make you sick, but it's a fact that Mo Mowlem brokered an agreement between "terrorists" on BOTH sides. I have no problem with politicians talking to all sorts of unsavoury characters if it ends up improving - or even saving - lives. I do have a problem with governments selling arms to nasty regimes who then go out and kill political opponents (think Saudi Arabia and Yemenis).
The "Czech thing" is just another "smear Corbyn at all costs" by the more extreme right. There is no need to own up to which daily paper you read: we can tell. It might come down to whether you believe Mr Corbyn when he says he didn't know the Czech was a spy. I need not ask which way your view leans.
Has your favoured rag said anything about Robert Davis (Deputy leader of Westminster Council) and all his freebies with the property developers yet? Might that have any bearing on the Council's failure to insist on 'affordable' housing being built? Might I remind you that's the council that owns Grenfell Tower?
Of course, the establishment Right is squeaky clean, and anyway it's no business of the likes of us inferior subjects to ask difficult questions.

Richard recently had an accident, and because there was a lot of blood, and he was behind a broken roller shutter door with no other access we called out ambulance and fire brigade.
He'd genuinly thought he'd cut an artery there was so much blood at first and we thought we'd got to get him out fast before it was too late.
The call handler was absolutely fantastic, giving us advice, keeping me calm and getting me help.
When we finally got to him it was a bad cut but not an artery. We were quite embarrised that we'd called out so many of the emergency services, If we could have got Richard out I'd have driven him to hospital, but the ambulance crew were quite happy, they'd enjoyed their trip on blues and 2's and said we'd been the most deserving call that day, compared to the one to a 20 year old chap with diahrea!
We wanted to say thank you, and send some chocolates, but it wans't easy.
The next time we went to the hospital for a check up we asked one of the waiting ambulance crews how to go about finding the crew. They suggested the local ambulance station as we didn't know where the crew was based.
When I rang they were unable to tell me where the crew or the call handler was based, not because they couldn't find out, but because it was against the rules due to people trying to find out and do them harm.
There was however an email address we could send our thanks to. We did that and got an email back almost immediately saying they would pass our thanks on and giving us the head office address to send the cholocates to.
We duely sent them off, and a couple of weeks later received an email form the call handler thanking us for the chocs which had been received and appreciated by her teams, and being happy to find out the result of the cvall, anbd that it had been a good outcome.
I really can't understand why people think it's OK to abuse the fire or ambulance staff, they are only there to help.
I can understand a little more people having a problem with the police if they have been cought doing somethingh they shouldn't. No excuse for it though.
Sue